


A golden wind

by gloss



Category: Captain America (Comics)
Genre: M/M, Time Travel, bucky's always a little winter soldier, gay bathhouses, steve is the perfect 1970s gay clone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-22
Updated: 2007-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1629083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky has always been looking for Steve. (Spoilers through v.5 #31)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A golden wind

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Ziho

 

 

 _Time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass._ (Siegfried Sassoon, "Absolution")

Captain America died as he had chosen to live his life, straight-backed, silent and solitary among those he'd sworn to protect. Harried by the crowd and the shouts, he walked alone. There was no halo lighting his steps, and Foley Square was far from Golgotha. He was tired, and beaten, and he threw himself toward the first bullet, met Sharon's unthinking treachery with a relieved sigh, as if all this, too, were what he wanted.

His body had not been his own for sixty-five years. It belonged first to the scientists, then to the nation. As muscles ripped free from bone and blood pumped pointlessly, spraying red over blue-white marble, he may have smiled in welcome.

He died beaming, clutching her hand, and heard -- beyond the klaxon's cry and the curses of the paramedics -- a boy's surprised bark of laughter. A toss of dark hair from bright eyes, the quick gleam of teeth.

He died as he'd wakened a decade ago, Bucky's name on his lips.

*

Whether he had prey or not, Bucky hunted. He was always on the move. He knew no other way. He just kept going -- living on as his mother died, moving to the barracks when his father tumbled from the sky, falling through clouds himself, then the ice, breaking free from jars to hunt for others.

Somewhere past the cosmic cube and Lehigh's shuttered darkness, after Gretchen's grave, Bucky had to face facts. 

He knew already that he was a killer; he'd always been. He had his training and his orders, and no regret to spare. Now, however, he knew he was a traitor as well as a predator.

Steve's mercy had faltered, and he did not kill Bucky. He made him remember instead, which was at once cruel and just.

Bucky slept in ditches, below bridges, in the back of trucks, and he remembered. He moved forward, as he always had, hiking kilometer on kilometer through Ohio farmland and Michigan suburbs as he had across Siberian tundra and down crooked Prague alleys. He moved, and remembered; the memories moved him as surely as his red, aching feet.

He remembered his first glimpse of Steve, two nights before they were assigned to each other, how the tent's shadows criss-crossed his bared shoulders like wings, how the costume's leggings peeled down easy as an apple. He remembered slitting his first Nazi's throat, and killing the last, one of Zemo's men, as they raced for the drone plane. He remembered the warm thump of Steve's tackle, countless times, knocking him out of range, and the damp punctuation marks Steve's sweaty hair made against his forehead when he removed the cowl. He remembered the cold of German winters and the throbbing heat of Algerian deserts, the swampy lassitude of Lehigh's Indian summers and crisp, off-putting chill of London's autumns.

Bucky remembered, and wrapped his false arm around his chest as he squeezed shut his eyes against the tide.

Bucky remembered _everything_. 

He assembled a list of targets.

*

"Buck."

The boy's shape faded even as Steve called to it. 

Steve rolled over and threw an arm across his eyes. Paper money fluttered around him. He begged for company, but the word brought money.

Later, someone kicked him in the ribs, cursing Halloween, before limping away on a broken foot.

Steve went quiet.

*

Bucky did not work for Fury. Their goals merely happened to align.

"Copacetic-like," Fury called it, and rolled the cigar-butt to the other side of his mouth. His good eye squinted hard, appraising Bucky. "Your call."

Bucky threw in another six chips. "Raise."

"Fold." Fury dropped his cards and sighed, passing his palm over his face. "Too rich for my blood."

Some nights Bucky cut Fury's hair, nicked the nape of his neck, just to check that he was human and no robot. 

"Like you can bitch, cyborg," Fury said once and bent Bucky's metal thumb back to the wrist joint. Grinning, he bussed a sloppy raspberry against Bucky's forehead and shoved him away. "Not that you ever had much soul to begin with, didja?"

*

A kindly passerby helped Steve to his feet and brushed the worst of the dirt from his shredded costume. He pressed twenty dollars into Steve's numb hand and directed him to a mission in the Bowery.

Steve knew his name, and he knew this city, but no more. This was home, and he would always know New York, throughout its unending changes. At the mission, he received a change of clothes and a cot in a room with ten other men. Others complained about the noise and the crowding, but Steve slept easily.

The next day, gritty-eyed and sticky with the remains of panic sweat, he made his way to a Jewish baths he thought he knew near Tompkins Square. 

The old men who'd chattered like crows and stroked black curls gently in the wavering steam were gone, but the baths remained, a series of damp and dark echoing spaces crowded with naked bodies. Steve handed over a dollar and received a towel; he swam a hundred lengths in the overheated pool and sat in the steam room until he was pink down to his toes.

Softened by the steam, blushing and shining in the heat, men reached for each other. Steve watched. He saw lips slide down throats, fingers tighten on hips, smiles spread and moans spill free, bouncing against the tiles.

He closed his eyes, sweat and dirt cascading from his pores, and listened to the echoing, guttural sounds of living.

*

Bucky and Fury dismantled the Kronas corporation executive by executive, untangled its private hedge funds with data bombs and real C4, until they'd pierced the heart of its energy reserves. Lukin toppled, his embolism removing the Red Skull's link to the world.

Bucky went half-naked, knife in his teeth, to break Lemar Hoskins from the Negative Zone. When the Avengers finished hugging the free man, Bucky was gone.

"Kid's got itchy feet," Fury told Dr. Strange, who conveyed the message to Cage and the rest of the team. "Always did --" Cigar smoke bloomed from his red lips. "-- Prob'ly always will."

*

Curious and eager, Steve returned to the baths. Being touched, kissing, these felt _new_ , somehow. Afterward, one could embrace and rest. The wide arms and quick breathing of a sudden friend comforted him, though he still didn't know what troubled him in the first place. Occasionally he saw a tall Black man, one of his best friends, and, more rarely, a dark-haired kid named Jim. 

Anyone could become a friend there, for half an hour or longer, and Steve never had to speak. The beauty and generosity were enough to take your breath away.

He was there often enough that one morning the owner took him aside, grasped his arm and pointed to his short hair. "Marines?"

Most men on the streets wore their hair quite long. Steve shook his head.

"Army, then," the owner said and Steve nodded. "How many tours?"

Steve shrugged. 

He left that day with a job. Perhaps he _had_ been to Viet Nam, as the owner said. 

Anything was possible. 

*

"Consider my offer --"

Stark wouldn't shut up. His face shone with sweat and the pulse in his throat jumped irregularly as he chattered. His toes in four-hundred dollar shoes grazed the Persian rug as he dangled from Bucky's fist.

Bucky shook his head and shifted his weight back onto his heels. Stark would make him Captain America. Stark might have been a genius, but he didn't know _shit_.

Only a good man could carry the shield. Bucky was good at what he did. The difference between virtue and competence was enormous.

Stark's spittle sprayed his chin. "-- Steve left me a letter, James, he asked _me_ , his best friend, to --"

Steve's best friends were Elliot and Arnie, then Bucky; later, the Falcon. With his human hand, Bucky scratched the back of his neck. "You're not the only one who got that letter."

The difference was that _his_ letter had made Fury howl with laughter. He'd given it to Bucky as a memento.

Stark was desperate to make time, relying on his personal bodyguards and the full force of S.H.I.E.L.D., as well as his remote-controlled armor, to rescue him.

Fifteen bodies twitched lifelessly in Bucky's wake, and the armor had shattered under his boot. So he let Stark talk a little more.

He seemed to enjoy the sound of his own voice, cracked with fear as it was, and relished even more the minutest details of his own brilliance and foresight. His dismissal of Sharon's child -- "We gave it back, it was useless, no serum in it." -- was undercut by the dribble of urine down his pants leg.

Bucky lifted Stark higher, until his toes left the ground entirely, and tightened the metal fingers around his throat.

"...and so what I'm wondering, what took you so long?" Stark's smirk was distorted by the bruise-purple swelling in his face. "Have trouble finding me?"

"Wasn't looking for you." Bucky cut Stark's throat, let the blood catch him full in the face, and released him to thud to the floor. "Not for you."

*

Steve grew in a mustache like many of the other bathers, but kept his hair cropped. He rented towels, lockers, and cubicles, spending slow shifts sketching on the damp, rippled pages of a composition tablet he'd found on the sidewalk.

He might have been a simpleton, or, in another war, shell-shocked; the baths' patrons offered a variety of theories. A few argued he was crippled by guilt for napalming babies, but a second look at his easy, open expression and wide blue eyes was enough to change their minds.

Many didn't care. They couldn't even have admitted that anything was _wrong_ with the man: "With those tits and ass? I should have such woes."

Pleasure billowed through the tiled halls faster than the steam. Though Steve's memory was poor, he knew that such frank acknowledgment of common desire and mutual satisfaction was rare outside these walls.

His dreams were bleak quests over broken ground.

*

"Plug-ugly, manipulative, shit-stinkin' one-eyed ape": Fury had been called every name in the book, many of the worst by himself. Still, the volley of recrimination and cursing that followed his announcement was impressive, to say the least.

Bucky stood in the corner, human hand on his holster, cybernetic one folded over his chest. Little Wiccan blushed and drew in on himself as the yelling continued; he'd accomplished Fury's secret-most plan, and he looked duly ashamed.

Fury just grinned. Beside him, Dugan had the sense to go red and outraged as the rest.

Falcon took the offensive, driving his fist into Fury's metal desk. "You double-dealing wanna-be Machiavelli, you're telling us you knew where he was all this fucking _time_?"

Hoskins stood tall and almost regal in the red, white and blue costume of the new Captain America, and he reached for Falcon's shoulder. Rather than making peace, however, he leaned in and spat at Fury's smug face. "You lied to us."

Bucky had never been much of a teammate; the Invaders were just a group who argued more often than they won. But this tiny eighth-floor office in a shaky row house on the extreme east side of Manhattan was crowded with Steve's comrades. They pulled together as one -- Cage, Hoskins, Spider-Man and Patriot, Daredevil, Jessica Jones and Natasha, and more -- to accuse Fury of every deceit from Abel's death onward.

Wherever he went, Steve had inspired respect, but, more than that, he inspired _warmth_ , fellowship, something close to love. 

Bucky scratched the underside of his jaw and waited out the storm. Wiccan caught his gaze, his blush fading now in the light of a few stray sparks leaping from his fingers. He glanced quickly away, to Hulkling, who'd swelled six times his usual size in his anger.

"...and that's all well'n good," Fury said as he tapped the ash off his cigar onto Dugan's shoe. "Yer all cranky 'cause you wish you'd thought of it."

The silence was sudden, roiling and full.

The cherry on Fury's cigar glowed against his hollowed cheeks. "Heart of the matter, way I see it, though, is who's gonna go get him?"

"We buried him." Falcon's voice was dry as cinders. "You let us think..."

"You buried a costume." Fury hocked and spit, then straightened in his chair. "Little witchboy here, now -- he's the real hero."

Wiccan looked away. "I wanted to help. I thought --"

Shrunken down to the kid he really was, Hulkling patted Wiccan's shoulder roughly.

"Barnes?" Fury jabbed the cigar in Bucky's direction. "Nothing on the agenda, I'm assuming?"

Bucky knew they were all looking at him. They were, however, as hypothetical as the audience for newsreels and comic books had ever been. He straightened his shoulders and met Fury's glare. "Sir."

"Been wearing yer heart on yer sleeve for over a year now," Fury said.

"So to speak," Bucky replied. "Sir."

Fury tipped his head briefly, then addressed the rest. "I vote Barnes goes. Any objections?"

"Now you're asking our opinion?" Patriot muttered, to which Fury harrumphed.

Although Bucky had no one to bid farewekk, he saluted Fury before Wiccan took his hand. The kid's step faltered once as he led Bucky to the shape of a doorway on the far wall. Drawn in shuddering, sparking blue light, the door opened onto a void.

Wiccan squeezed Bucky's hand. "I want you to be happy."

Bucky stepped forward and didn't look back.

*

When not at the baths or out with his new friends, Steve liked to walk around the city, sketchbook under his arm, pencil behind his ear. 

He was returning from one such urban hike, jogging up the stairs of the mission, when a commotion broke out at the door. Men in dark overcoats, far too heavy for the spring weather, stumbled backwards, carrying a writhing, shouting, _fighting_ man.

There were five of them and just one of their opponent, but he snarled and spit and kicked out all his limbs like a drowning cat. The fight was unfair; Steve could help. 

Steve tripped the man nearest him, then knocked the second off the stairs onto the sidewalk. One of the five spat something -- Russian, maybe, or German -- and Steve flew forward before his brain had time to translate the remark.

He punched that man, one hit sending him sprawling back through the doors, and kneed the other in the groin. Their victim had broken the arm of the fifth man and crouched on the top step, knees bent, breathing hard with long hair crowding his face.

Steve offered him a hand up. The man looked up at him, rage draining from his sharp, handsome features as his eyes widened.

*

Long after the heroes had departed, still grumbling, Dugan was performing a light cleaning. "Barnes isn't coming back, is he?" he asked.

Fury swung his feet up onto the desk and tipped back in his chair. The cigar's smoke puffed like a Sousa tune up to the ceiling.

"Nick?" Dugan set down the broom and dustpan and turned to face Fury. "I said, he's not --"

Fury grinned around his cigar.

After a long moment, Dugan shook his head, smile spreading his copious mustache. "Sentimental old goat, that's what you are."

"Best man for the job," Fury said and popped the cigar from his lips to crush it on the desk. "Not for nothing, it's just the truth."

*

"Found you," Bucky said and Steve kissed him again, pressing his chest against Bucky's, flattening him, trying to get even closer.

His voice was still raspy from disuse, and his memories confused and contradictory. But Steve knew this, knew Bucky and the warmth in his lean frame, the intelligence in his bright eyes.

"Bucky," Steve replied, burying his face against Bucky's sweaty neck, as Bucky laughed for the first time since 1945.

 


End file.
